Politicians appear to overestimate how conservative public opinion is in the U.S. and other Western democracies. Whether this “conservative bias” extends to voters remains unclear but has important implications for belief formation and behavior. I examine this in the context of abortion access after the Dobbs decision. Despite the salience of the topic, original survey data collected post-Dobbs reveal consistent underestimation of public support for abortion access. Individuals identifying as “pro-life” drive most of this underestimation, suggesting the presence of egocentric biases in which “pro-life” Americans overestimate the commonality of their views. Conservative biases among voters may contribute to a skewed information environment for politicians, potentially providing leverage for further restrictions on abortion access.

In its first twenty years, Politics & Gender has played a key role in the development of a robust and thriving literature on electoral gender quotas. This article reviews the 76 articles published on this topic in the journal between 2005 and 2024. It first takes a chronological view, analyzing publication patterns over time to show how the field has expanded through research articles, Critical Perspectives essays, book reviews, and Notes from the Field. As part of this survey, it identifies publications that have been particularly influential in shaping knowledge on quotas and their various impacts. The article then takes a thematic view, showing how work published in Politics & Gender has advanced knowledge in the fields of comparative politics and international relations. It focuses on five main literatures: candidate selection, electoral reform, political careers, policy-making processes, and stereotypes and public opinion. The final part of the article reflects on the broader integration of quota research into political science. Quota scholars are increasingly publishing their work in top disciplinary journals, at the same time that quotas have attracted growing interest among authors who would not consider gender to be a central axis of their research program. The article concludes by advocating a dual strategy of engaging debates at multiple levels and across intellectual arenas.

How does cognitive household labour – the ‘mental load’ involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs – influence decisions about whether and how to participate in public life? Studies suggest women take on the vast majority of this load, yet the impact of these private sector inequalities on participation in public life is underexplored. To make progress on these questions, we contribute new causal evidence about the effect of prompting respondents to think about their own mental loads in a survey experiment fielded to employed British parents. Our main argument is that priming the mental load will crowd out interest in political and labour market participation. In line with expectations, our survey experiment finds a strong negative effect of mental load priming on intentions to engage in politics and at work. Our results offer new insights about the continuing relevance of household-based inequalities to gender equality in public life.

Do citizens evaluate quota and non-quota politicians similarly? Do voters perceive quota-elected politicians as less competent and autonomous? Despite the proliferation of gender quotas, it remains unclear how citizens view female quota politicians compared to their non-quota male and female counterparts. This is particularly important in electoral systems where competitive and reserved seats both exist. We conducted a vignette experiment in Morocco where we randomized information about how politicians were elected and their legislative behavior. We find no evidence that voters evaluate quota women as less competent than non-quota male and female politicians. Our data demonstrate partial support for the argument that quota women are perceived as pawns of their parties, although information about legislative behavior can mitigate this perception.

Women are globally underrepresented as political leaders; as of January 2023, only 17 countries had a woman head of government. Included in this small group is Samoa, which elected Fiame Naomi Mata’afa as its first woman prime minister in 2021 after a fiercely contested election and subsequent protracted legal disputes centered around interpretations of Samoa’s 10% gender quota. Drawing on data from the Pacific Attitudes Survey, the first large-scale, nationally representative popular political attitudes survey conducted in the Pacific region, this article examines how the political environment in Samoa shapes opportunities for women’s political participation and leadership. Using the theoretical framework of cohabitation, it finds that although there is an enabling environment for women’s participation and leadership in formal politics, women’s access to decision-making spaces more broadly is still constrained by norms of traditional leadership. This speaks to traditional and nontraditional political norms and practices that coexist, at times uneasily, alongside one another.

Calls for more family-friendly assemblies, specifically those able to accommodate representatives who are pregnant, postpartum or have young children, have become urgent in the last decade, as a mini-baby boom in the federal parliament and the provinces has called the inclusivity of legislatures into question. Drawing on interviews with legislative clerks, this article asks two questions: 1) Are Canadian legislatures family-friendly? And 2) what approaches to family-friendly legislatures emerge from policies and discussions within these legislatures? It identifies patterns both in the types of changes that are proposed and those which are actioned, finding that changes have leaned heavily on the least consequential improvements. Many calls for change continue to run up against structural challenges that have been, thus far, ignored. Although legislatures are more family-friendly than in previous decades, this article argues that the future of inclusive parliaments hinges on a broad rethinking of the parliamentary role.

Research in social psychology has long argued that exposure to objectifying portrayals of women can lead to increasingly misogynist attitudes and behavior. We argue that such images can also impact on gendered policy attitudes. We suggest that objectifying images prime sexist attitudes and reduce perceptions of women’s agency, warmth, and competence. We argue that this may translate into decreased support for reproductive rights and other gender-salient policies. Furthermore, these effects may vary by the gender of those exposed to these images. In two survey experiments with brief exposures to objectifying images, we find mixed support for these predictions. Although we find some negative effects as predicted, we also find positive effects of objectification among women in the sample that are suggestive of a backlash effect. We discuss potential explanations for this heterogeneity. Overall, our results suggest interesting avenues to further explore the effects of objectification on political outcomes.

This study draws together theories of women’s substantive representation and research on politicians’ knowledge of constituent preferences. We ask whether politicians are better at predicting their constituents’ policy preferences when they share the same gender. In doing so, we contribute to knowledge about the mechanisms underlying substantive representation. Using original surveys of 3,750 Canadians and 867 elected politicians, we test whether politicians correctly perceive gender gaps in their constituents’ policy preferences and whether women politicians are better at correctly identifying the policy preferences of women constituents. Contrary to expectations from previous research, we do not find elected women to be better at predicting the preferences of women constituents. Instead, we find that all politicians — regardless of their gender — perform better when predicting women’s policy preferences and worse when predicting men’s preferences. The gender of the constituent matters more than the gender of the politician.

While comparative research on gender and politics has produced a sizable literature on the appointment of women to cabinet positions in democracies, we know surprisingly little about appointment practices in authoritarian contexts at subnational levels. We address this gap with the resumés of 3,681 political appointees in subnational China (2003–2020). Our analysis reveals that subnational Chinese politics meets most of the criteria scholars put forward as being indicative of gendered institutions: (1) women and men's career patterns are different; (2) women are assigned to more feminine posts, while masculine posts provide more promotion opportunities; and (3) regarding backgrounds, women are younger, better educated and more likely to be ethnic minorities as a result of the implementation of tandem quotas. The findings advance the literature on gender and politics, showing that gender's effect on appointment transcends regime types and the dichotomy of national/subnational politics.

Do female legislators have different policy preferences than male legislators? Despite a large body of literature from liberal democracies and recent studies of electoral authoritarian regimes, this topic has received little attention in the context of single-party regimes. Based on quasi-experimental methods and regression models, we analyze original data from 38,383 proposals introduced during China’s 12th National People’s Congress and test the effect of gender on policies concerning conventionally selected feminine issues and “political stance,” issues that are unique to single-party regimes. The analysis confirms the effect of gender on policy preference across several feminine issues. However, the effect of gender is null on issues concerning political stance. Our findings suggest that while single-party regimes allow gender differences to emerge among legislators on issues that are not politically important, they tend to discourage such differences on politically prominent issues. This study advances the literature on both gender politics and authoritarian politics.

When a party selects an out lesbian as its leader, do women and LGBT people evaluate that leader more positively? And do they become more likely to vote for that party? We answer these questions using the case of Kathleen Wynne, premier of Ontario, Canada, from 2013 to 2018. We draw on four large-sample surveys conducted by Ipsos before and after the 2011 and 2014 Ontario elections. We compare shifts in best premier choice and vote choice among non-LGBT men, non-LGBT women, LGBT men, and LGBT women from 2011 to 2014. We find gender and LGBT affinity in leader evaluations. However, we find that only non-LGBT women and LGBT men were more likely to vote Liberal after Wynne became leader. This article contributes to research on affinity by examining LGBT affinity in a real-world election and the intersection of gender and LGBT affinity.

This article advances and tests an original theory of a “feminine homestyle” to explain how female legislators develop relationships with constituents that both mitigate the potential for gendered biases and fulfill the communal goals that motivate women to run for political office. We use an original audit study that tests legislator responsiveness to direct email communication. We show that female lawmakers are more responsive to constituent communication and more likely to display compassion and empathy in responses compared with male legislators; but we also find important differences in women’s responsiveness across the race and ethnicity. Further, we find that responsive female lawmakers can change the behaviors of their male counterparts by creating stronger norms of responsiveness within legislative institutions. Our findings have important downstream implications for democratic accountability among voters and illustrate how female lawmakers substantively represent through direct communication with constituents.

Law clerks hold immense responsibilities and exert influence over the judges they work with. However, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We argue that one reason for this underrepresentation is that – like potential political candidates – female law students may have lower levels of ambition compared to men. Using a survey of student editors at thirty-three top law reviews, we find that there is a gender gap in ambition for clerkships with the Supreme Court and Federal Courts of Appeal. Examining potential sources of this difference, we find that while women view themselves to be just as qualified for these positions as men, men are more willing to apply with lower feelings of qualification. Likewise, while women and men report similar levels of encouragement, more encouragement is required before women express ambition to hold these posts. The findings presented here have implications for research on judicial politics, political ambition, and women’s representation.

Many democracies with high levels of corruption are also characterized by low levels of women's political representation. Do women candidates in democracies with high levels of corruption face overt voter discrimination? Do gender dynamics that are unique to highly corrupt, democratic contexts influence citizens’ willingness to vote for women? We answer these questions using two separate sets of experiments conducted in Ukraine: two vignette experiments and a conjoint analysis. In line with existing cross-sectional research on Ukraine, our experiments reveal little evidence of direct voter bias against women candidates. Our conjoint analysis also offers novel insights into the preferences of Ukrainian voters, showing that both men and women voters place a great deal of value in anti-corruption platforms, but voters are just as likely to support women and men candidates who say they will fight corruption. Our analysis suggests that women's political underrepresentation in highly corrupt contexts is driven more by barriers that prevent women from winning party nominations and running for office in the first place, rather than overt discrimination at the polls.

Objectification and dehumanization are topics often discussed within the social psychology and feminist theory literature. Research on objectification has largely focused on the sexual objectification of women’s bodies, whereas the dehumanization literature has focused on dehumanization in the context of racial and ethnic groups. Extant political science research has only recently begun to engage with these concepts. In this manuscript, we build upon these literatures and apply these insights to questions relevant to politics. In particular, we argue that objectifying and dehumanizing portrayals of women impact how voters evaluate women politicians and how much they support gender parity in politics. Through a proposed experimental design, we test our hypothesis that the objectification of women as a group can decrease positive evaluations and likelihood of electoral support for women political candidates.

Gender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic methodology to bring important contributions to understand the reproduction of gender, gender hierarchies, gendered relations, and their redress in parliamentary settings. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the U.K. House of Commons and the European Parliament and finds distinctive gendered cultures and norms in debating and working parliaments. Focusing on one dimension of this distinction—the parliamentary debating chamber—the article argues that parliamentary ethnography provides novel empirical insights into this conceptual distinction and into empirical understandings of gendered debating and working parliaments. While parliamentary ethnography is a fruitful innovation, the article discusses the drawbacks of this methodology and provides feminist reflection on ways to make it more accessible.